Dave Groom is a deputy state public defender in Oregon. He is chair of the
Oregon Criminal Defense Lawyers Association Capital Defenders Executive
Committee. He also serves on the OCDLA Amicus and Legislative Committees. This article
first appeared in the June 1997 issue of The Oregon Defense Attorney.
On May 16, 1997 at Oregon State Penitentiary (OSP), the government executed Harry Charles Moore, whose true name was Jerry Moore. I used to be his lawyer, and I was one of the people who stood in the execution room and watched the life leave his body.
Jerry Moore was a paradoxical individual. He was vulgar, profane, brutal, vindictive, rigid and an incestuous pedophile. He was also funny, friendly, loyal, compassionate (toward those he liked), observant and street-smart. He was the kind of guy who, if you saw him on the street, you would alter your path to avoid encountering him, all the while watching him out of the corner of your eye. But he could also pull you into his world by the force of his smile. This, however, is not a eulogy for Jerry Moore, because his life was not as interesting as his death. It was the death penalty that gave Jerry Moore his 15 minutes of fame; without it, he was just another guy in prison for life for killing people in his family, a story as old as Cain and Abel.
The machinery of death in these enlightened times is shiny and slick and gleaming and ominous. Here in civilized Oregon, you won't see flames shooting out from under the mask because Ol' Sparky has a short circuit, or hear the grunt of a man as his neck breaks at the end of a rope. You just see the condemned fall peacefully asleep. The process is seductive in its supposed humaneness, and you almost find yourself thinking that it was all for the best, to end it this way. No muss, no hassle.
By the time he died, Jerry had either alienated or murdered all the members of his family that had been important to him, so there were no relatives to witness either as victims or as his guests. That's how I got invited to the execution. I wrote the brief and argued his automatic appeal to the Supreme Court, losing it in spite of some pretty good penalty phase issues. He grew to think of me as a friend; I saw him as a client with no one else with whom to talk. I felt sad about the tragedy of his life, and his grandiose proclamations about his importance in past situations. I listened to him talk of his "autobiography," which was nothing more than a disjointed, vitriolic rambling journal of his life on Death Row. So I attended the state-sponsored murder--or government-assisted suicide -- because he asked me to be there.
The dread and anxiety began to grow during the week before the execution. I felt tired, cranky, stressed; getting any actual work done was next to impossible. I wanted to be normal, to behave normally, as if this whole thing was no big deal. Instead, I felt the same as I do in the week before a Supreme Court argument, or even the way I did before the bar exam.
On the day of the execution, I brought my best suit to Salem, along with a few diversions to help pass the time sitting in my office after dark: a book, a crossword puzzle, a couple of tapes. Many people called, including Jerry Moore, and we talked for about an hour. He still expressed no fear of death, saying only that he did fear meeting his Creator, but he expressed no remorse. He did what he had to do, he said, in killing his half-sister/mother-in-law and her husband. He was justified in killing them to protect his daughter under the law of Moses, and in some societies he would be held in high esteem for his actions, he said. He carried those thoughts to the gurney.
At 9:30 P.M., I drove to the parking area from which we were to be shuttled to the penitentiary, which was kept secret so the TV cameras wouldn't find us. The Department of Corrections (DOC) officials kept us in three groups: the press, Moore's attorneys (myself and Moore's trial attorneys, Heidi Neel and Mike Mills), and a group of Marion County officials, including the two district attorneys that prosecuted him. I know both of them, they are not bad guys at all, but I was distinctly unhappy to see them there. I spoke not a word to them, and vowed not to make eye contact. I'd be damned if anything I did or said became fodder for cocktail hour gossip at a DA's conference.
We were shuttled in these groups to the front of OSP, through DOC property. On the way, we passed through a lot of cyclone fencing and razor wire, and Heidi wondered aloud if we were still in America. Indeed, the landscape looked like a newsreel of East Berlin in the 1960s. We passed police cars at several locations, adding to the Big Brother effect. The cops stopped talking and stared into our van as we passed.
At OSP, we went through a metal detector and had our hands stamped. We waited in a nearby comfortable office for about an hour, chatting with each other and several DOC officials, drinking coffee and eating fruit. The lateness of the hour and the chanting of demonstrators from State Street were the only things that reminded me I was attending an execution. The demonstrators were louder than during the Wright execution last September, a DOC guy said.
At 11:30 P.M., we went to the unit containing the death chamber, at the rear of OSP. My tension level sky-rocketed each time we were moved to someplace new, and I hoped I wouldn't vomit. They said they had medical people standing by, in case we needed help, but I didn't believe I would need help vomiting; I could do that all by myself. Being with Mike and Heidi helped immensely. We developed an imaginary bubble, insulating ourselves from the clinical insanity of this process.
Finally, at several minutes after midnight we were led back to the chamber. It was small, about 8 by 12, a room in the corner of a slightly larger room. There were two windows, one on the end and one on the side, with venetian blinds closed. We stood around the outside on a small platform, all twelve of the witnesses now together. No talking was allowed. I picked a spot on the wall under the side window and stared at it, very much aware of the five members of the media to my left whose pencils were scratching on their pads of paper.
At 12:20 A.M., the blinds lifted. Jerry was strapped to the gurney, looking stressed, anxious, miserable. They had not been able to find a suitable vein in his left arm, so he had to wait on the gurney for a half hour while they poked at him. I couldn't imagine what torture that must have been.
The superintendent was in there with him. Jerry looked over at us briefly, locating me and giving me a half-smile. He laid his head back down and said, "Thank the executioner for me." Then he said, " I want the last thing I say to be 'Jennifer'." He spelled it, "J-E-N-N-I-F-E-R." That was his daughter's name. The superintendent left the room and the execution began. Jerry closed his eyes and breathed deeply a couple of times; then all activity stopped. His right eye was completely closed, but bizarrely, his left lid was slightly open, allowing the institutional light to gleam on his dark pupil. I could tell no one was in there any more. We were led out.
Let me say this about the death penalty. It is pointless and it is wrong. I cannot debate death penalty proponents about whether it is right or wrong; that is a moral judgment, and neither of us will be persuaded by the arguments of the other. But I will debate with anyone whether this death had a point to it, and I think that is an argument I can win.
If the point was to punish Jerry Moore, then it failed, because he wanted to die. Punishment would have been letting him live. If the point was to keep society safe from him, then his death was pointless because this 56-year-old diabetic would never have left prison alive. Society was safe without the death penalty.
If, as I suspect, the point was to relieve society of its anger toward Jerry and other murderers -- in other words, revenge -- then the exercise was an abject failure. People who are angry about crime will be satisfied with Moore's death for about ten minutes, until the next murder hits the morning news. They will get angry all over again, demanding the death of that murderer, and so on. The cycle of anger never ends, and the death penalty provides no actual relief for that anger. It is idiotic and absurd for the government to try to assuage society's anger by putting a citizen to death. Government should set a high moral tone by its actions, not respond to the anger and hatred of its lowest common denominator.
I got into my Miata at about 1:00 A.M., to return to my home in Portland. The night was still and warm, the air full of some spring flower I couldn't identify, and I breathed in a few times. The freeway was almost empty; 1:00 is a great hour to commute. I put in a Bob Dylan tape from back in the Pleistocene Era, and listened to "A Hard Rain's Gonna Fall," over and over again. The song brought me back into myself. That song should be declared the national anthem of the underdog.
When Dylan got to the part about going back out ". . .where the home in the forest meets the damp, dirty prison, and the executioner's face is always well-hidden . . .," I sang along, not well, just loud. A few tears came, not for Jerry Moore the person, but because I had tried to keep him alive and I had lost. I had failed. The government got him. I began to wish I was driving somewhere distant, like San Diego or Dallas, anywhere with a lot of empty space between here and there. I just wanted to drive.